Ciautistico!

Important; 2005

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This loose, billowing collaboration between the American avant-pop band Xiu Xiu and Italian post-rockers Larsen has a familiar back story: It's the classic band-meets-band, band-pursues-band, band-gets-band narrative arc. Xiu Xiu and Larsen, each aware and vaguely admiring of the other, meet at a Jarboe show, exchange records, vow to stay in touch, and become so mutually enthralled that they actually follow through and record an album together. They meet up in Torino without much of a plan and immerse themselves in the studio with trad rock instruments plus a bunch of theremins and glockenspiels. They jam intensely around sketched-out song structures and sequence the most realized bits as an album, an ephemeral and fractured thing that mirrors its mode of creation.

As listeners, we're rightfully wary of such one-off collaborations-- they often produce thrilling results in rap, where oversized personalities slam into one another explosively, but in indie rock, they can lead to a sort of hazy obscurantism as each musician tiptoes around the other's style. The results are often more interesting than realized, the sort of exploratory blurs that the In the Fishtank series often produces, which are easy to praise and then quickly forget about. And XXL may well wind up as such an artifact, prized by collectors but inessential for the causal fan. Nevertheless, it's surprisingly cohesive and focused for such a spontaneous production, largely because each band tempers the other's excesses. Xiu Xiu's confessional overstatement is as distinctly American as Larsen's cerebral reserve is European, and on Ciautistico!, they meet in the middle to create a music that scans as either a more rational Xiu Xiu, as on the structurally balanced instrumental tracks uninterrupted by dramatic shards of dissonance, or more emotional Larsen, as on the tracks where Stewart's aching vocals imbue the silvery drones with a messy human presence.

As if striving to embody the impulses of both bands, Ciautistico! is both corporeal and weightless-- you feel the bodily plunk of each intoned string and chime, and the shimmering confusion of the resultant sound waves decaying and diffusing into one another. The tone is icy yet resonant, drops of water falling into a deep well. "Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw" opens with a low three-note bass drone and watery synth washes, but instead of continuing down the path of abstraction, Larsen's insanely tight drummer and Stewart's timorous vocals bundle up the atmosphere into a gloomy pop song. This is immediately offset by the album's most daunting song, "Minnie Mouseistic", which plays like the sound effects for a radio drama-- discordant tones, gentle concussions, creaks and ratchets bloom in isolation on a field of silence. Certain moments are pure Xiu Xiu, like the svelte electro-throb of "Ciao Ciautistico" and the sparkling fountain of synths that closes "Birthday Song", but for the most part, Xiu Xiu and Larsen slip into a methodical mind-meld, shuffling melodies and countermelodies toward their logical conclusions.